Actar Publishers is committed to investigating the culture of the architectural, urbanism and landscape disciplines through innovative design, theory, criticism and pedagogy. Actar is focused on the works and research of established and emerging practitioners, professors, and thinkers such as Charles Waldheim, Neil Brenner, Kiel Moe, Abalos+Sentkiewicz, Alejandro Zaera-Polo, AKTII, Farshid Moussavi, Lateral Office, Pezo von Ellrichshausen, ODA, nArchitects, LAN, Rania Ghosn & El Hadi Jazairy, Daniel Ibàñez, Mimi Zeiger, among others.
Actar also participates in publishing and distributing the periodicals New Geographies, Ness, and Cornell Journal of Architecture documenting issues overlooked yet central to our cultural milieu. These publications have evolved out of the new disciplinary territory at the intersection of architecture, landscape, environment, and digital culture.
Since 2015, Actar’s new digital platform urbanNext has shaped and expanded architecture and design practices to rethink cities. Through it, Actar is producing new tools for its global dissemination with new impulses, new proposals, and new goals to expand architecture publishing. As an example of this very successful symbiosis between printed and digital contents, we have partnered with the first Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism 2017 “Imminent Commons,” which has resulted in the publication of four books as well as a vast amount of videos, essays and projects available at https://urbannext.net/tag/seoul-biennale-2017/.
In addition to its own publications, Actar Distribution, “Actar D,” represents these premier architecture publishers to the book trade in the Americas: Applied Research + Design, Birkhäuser, Detail Books, DOM Publishers, and ORO Editions. Actar D also co-publishes and distributes books internationally from eVolo and from renowned schools of architecture including Harvard University Graduate School of Design; Architectural Association School of Architecture – London; Yale School of Architecture; Columbia Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation and Cornell University.
Since September 2019 Actar D distributes Architectural Association School of Architecture books- UK.